Donald Trump refused to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan's re-election bid "to send a signal to Paul Ryan that I'm bigger than you, I'm more important than you — and when I become president you better remember it," former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday.
"It is classic negotiating with Donald Trump," Fleischer, 55, who served former President George W. Bush, told Brooke Baldwin on CNN. "You always negotiate with the speaker.
"You want him to think I have leverage on you. Trump is all about leverage."
Trump Tuesday refused to support Ryan in the primary race in Wisconsin and incumbent Sen. John McCain in his contest in Arizona.
Fleischer said that Trump is taking the "strong-hand" approach in negotiating by withholding his endorsements. "Donald Trump is a negotiator on everything.
"There are two schools," he later added. "You go in through accommodation and hope people give you things because you earned them.
"Sometimes that works in politics, sometimes it doesn't. The other is you go in with a strong hand.
"You have to stop judging Donald Trump through a traditional political lens," Fleischer cautioned. "For a year now we've known there is nothing traditional about him."
He also ripped the Republican presidential nominee for his continued attacks on the family of a Muslim Army captain who was killed in Iraq.
"What Donald Trump has done, he's become such a good counter-puncher that he's about to knock himself out," Fleischer said. "He's got to stop counter-punching people who are not running for president.
"He needs to focus on Hillary [Clinton] — and only Hillary. He can throw in a little bit of Barack Obama, because that would be Hillary's third term."
Fleischer added that President Bush has not attacked Trump "for the same reason he doesn't criticize Barack Obama.
"He looks at this very seriously and thinks that the office of the presidency should be respected and that former presidents are formers and that they should not weigh in on every little thing."
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